School is not inherently bad —but an exclusive focus on formal schooling as your only education, in the absence of real-world street-smarts, almost always is.
Listen to me in a teleconference with Dale Stephens, founder of Uncollege.org and “Chief Educational Deviant” of the Uncollege movement. This movement is liberating young people from constrictive views—foisted upon them by parents and teachers—about how they should educate themselves.
How to Deschool Your Mind: A Dialogue With Dale Stephens & Michael Ellsberg
You can listen to the audio of the call below.
I was excited about this call, because I got to focus less on the typical “how to” stuff that I write and talk a lot about, and instead got more philosophical. We talked about the ways traditional education can “school” our minds into conformism, and how to counteract these effects by “deschooling” our minds.
“Deschooling” means learning to value innovation over conformism, an individual path to development in your life over one-size-fits-all curricula, and real-world practical intelligence over classroom learning sheltered away from real-life experience.
You might think this is all airy-fairy new age stuff. On the contrary, in today’s uncertain, entrepreneurial economy, in which chaos and upheaval are the new normal, the rigid, bureaucratized, rule-following ways of thinking that you typically learn in school—in which all creativity and on-your-feet practical thinking is beaten out of you for being too unruly and disobedient–can be harmful to your economic health.
Listen to me and 19-year-old Dale Stephens, one of the leading lights in the world questioning traditional broken models of formalized education, in a wide-ranging live discussion. We had plenty of time for answering audience questions lon the line. We ventured deep into controversial and usually-unspoken topics around the rebellion against the bureaucratic mind-narrowing of traditional education, and the new revolution in self-education and life-long learning in America and across the world.
We’ve got for you a raucous, unscripted, uncensored dialogue about how to deprogram your mind from bureaucratized, overly-formal education, and find freedom in self-education.
